Speranza
Two things need to be made clear at the outset.
No one in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries spoke about 'folk tunes' -- but then nobody used 'drawing-room ballad' (less so 'parlour song') either.
People talk, instead, of an
"old air", or "old minstrelsy".
The main interest was in Celtic airs, particularly
those of the two countries in which major rebellions had been recently
suppressed: Scotland and Ireland.
Scotland is the first to make an impact on the English with her
'national airs'.
The reason could be traced back to the homesick Scots at the
Anglo-Scots court produced by the Union of Crowns in 1603.
The Scotch songs
which directly help to shape nineteenth-century bourgeois taste are, however,
of more recent date, being associated with the name of Robbie Burns, if you heard of him.
Interest
in Scotland had increased in the eighteenth century following the Act of Union,
1707.
Until then, England and Scotland had one ruler but were two states with two
governments.
In their "Beggar's OPERA" (not an opera, really), Gay and Pepusch select tunes from the
first published collection of Scotch songs, William Thomson's "Orfeo
caledonio" (1725).
One of the attractions of this collection was Thomson's
claim that seven of the airs were composed by Queen Mary Stuart's Italian
secretary, Davide RIZZIO.
James Oswald goes so far as to include airs of his own
in "The Caledonian Pocket Companion",stating that they were also by this Davide Rizzio.
There
is, in fact, no evidence to suggest that Davide Rizzio ever composed anything.
Oswald's publication appears in 1745. and is aimed to
satisfy not just the market for songs but also the demand for music
suited to the fashionable flute.
Allan Ramsay (of the ballad-opera, "The Gentle Shepherd" fame) feels the need to preserve
Scotch culture.
Ramsay's "Tea-Table Miscellany" (1723) contains words to Scotch
airs which are named but not notated.
Ramsay's preservation process involves the
words in a great deal of literary improvement and moral purification, an
exercise which is to become standard practice.
Thomson takes, without consent,
thirty-eight of Ramsay's songs for his "Orfeo Caledonio".
As Burns does later,
Ramsay portrays a peasant Scotland.
Ramsay's popular song
"The Yellow-Hair'd Laddie"
depicting a love-sick girl milking her ewes, was something an urban society
finds quaint and appealing.
It was Ramsay's 'Auld Lang Syne' which was later
added to by Burns (although Burns did not expect the words to be put to Shield's
tune).
Interest in Scotland was given a boost by James Macpherson's alleged
translations of ancient Gaelic poetry transmitted to him orally.
The verse was
supposed to be the work of Ossian, a third-century bard.
The collected works
appeared in 1765.
By reading Macpherson, Thomas Percy was stimulated to collect
his unreliable and improved "Reliques of Ancient Poetry".
Dr. Johnson, who never
once credits the myth of Ossian, excites further interest in Scotland when he
embarked upon his Hebridean tour in 1773.
Set against the fascination with
Scottish culture is the fact that after the 1745 rebellion the Act of
Proscription was passed, forbidding any wearing of Highland dress under threat
of imprisonment without bail for six months (for a first offence) or
transportation for seven years (for a second offence).
This does not simply
demand a change of fashion but a change of wardrobe necessitating a complete
alteration of the weavers' looms which were set up for the weaving of the
traditional sets.
In some areas, the poor are reduced to wearing sack cloth.
The
implied proscription of the piob mhor, the Highland war-pipe, may have done
incalculable damage to ceol mor, the most unique and highly developed form of
Celtic music.
Those pipers who turn to the fiddle are responsible for today's
distinctive West of Scotland fiddle style.
There is no interest, either, in the
living culture of Gaelic laments such as "The Lament for William Chisholm",
composed by his widow after his death at Culloden.
Another song undoubtedly
inspired by Culloden is Jean Elliot's "The Flowers of the Forest".
However, the
words (set to an old air first notated in the Skene MS, c. 1615) are ostensibly
about the battle of Flodden Field in 1513 when, in two hours of fighting, ten
thousand Scots are killed and King James IV is hacked to pieces.
Maurice Disher
claims that "The Flowers of the Forest" is o deeply felt as to solemnize
national mourning still and scorns the later version by Alicia Rutherford
(Mrs Cockburn).
Disher seems unaware that the pipe lament played at Scottish
funerals to this day is, in fact, based on the improved version of the tune by
this middle-class Edinburgh lady.
By the time Pitt is recruiting from the
Highlands for the conquest of Canada (1759), a ban on tartan could be lifted and
songs can be permitted which celebrated Jacobite victories.
"Johnnie Cope" by
Adam Skirven, which first appears in a volume of Oswald's Companion, mocks the
general who fled at the battle of Prestonpans, 1745.
Many have no doubt
assumed that the use ot this tune for reveille by the present-day Scots Guards
is designed to exasperate the English with a reminder of their defeat.
Ironically, Sir John Cope was serving in that regiment 1710-12 before it was
brought south to London by Queen Anne (to remain out of Scotland for two hundred
years).
Relations with Scotland were further healed by the restoration of
many forfeited estates in 1784.
It was three years later that James Johnson
began publishing "The Scots Musical Museum" which ran to six volumes.
This work
provides the cultural moment for an aesthetic reappraisal of Scotch songs.
From now on, the emphasis would NOT be on contrasting the artistic pretension of
THE ITALIAN OPERATIC ARIA with the simple folk air, but on annexing the latter
to the realm of high art.
The key figure involved with the collection was the
poet Robert Burns (1759-96), and the significance of this moment in Scottish
culture was retrospectively acknowledged by the adoption of Burns' 'Scots Wha
Hae' as the Scottish national anthem.
He had published only a single volume of
verse when he began contributing to the The Scots Musical Museum.
Burns is heavily involved in
volumes 2 to 5 and does not hesitate to improve, add to, and rewrite any songs
he finds
He also contributed to George Thomson's "Select Collection of Original
Scottish Airs", the first volume of six being published in 1793.
Although Burns
fails to rise in rank in his regular employment as an excise officer
because of his republican sympathies, he consistently refuses payment for his
songs until nine days before his death when he requests help with the payment
of a haberdasher's bill.
A sense of the cultural importance of compiling a
museum of Scottish song and preserving the Lallans dialect was sufficient
motivation.
Johnson's Musical Museum presents the songs in the simplest of
musical arrangements (a bass part with figured directions for harmony) by
Stephen Clarke.
George Thomson is more ambitious.
As a cultivated member of the
tasteful Edinburgh Musical Society and a clerical officer with the Board of
Trustees for the Encouragement of Art and Manufactures in Scotland, George Thomson hits upon
the idea of publishing Scottish airs in arrangements by Europe's leading
composers.
Indicating the general change taking place in aesthetic attitude,
the publisher William Napier has the identical idea at the very same time.
The
two great rivals in London in 1791 were Haydn and Pleyel, so it is no surprise
to find Napier engaging the former and Thomson the latter.
Ignace Pleyel's cello
and piano accompaniments were too elaborate for the amateur market Thomson had
in mind, so he changed to Leopold Kozeluch for his second volume.
Kozeluch's
arrangements did nothing to boost sales so he switched to Haydn.
Haydn was then
seduced away by another publisher, William Whyte, who offered to double
Thomson's rate of one guinea per song if he would provide arrangements for his
own two-volume Collection of Scottish Airs (1804—7).
Haydn is apologetic.
He
is suffering financially from the effects of inflation which was crippling
Vienna as a result of the war.
Thomson seemed doomed to make little money on his
project, yet he still insisted on the best-quality paper and binding and, as he
saw it, the best-quality arrangements.
He was not a professional publisher in
the mould of Napier and Whyte.
His motivation, like that of Burns, was patriotic
sentiment.
Thomson's dream was to produce 'a work that will ever remain the
standard of Scotch Music.
----- IRELAND.
The publisher William
Power saw a potential market for Irish songs improved n a similar manner.
The
United Irishmen's revolt had been suppressed and the Act of Union in 1800
prompts a drift of the "Anglo-Irish" aristocracy towards London.
Power approached
Tom Moore (1770—1852) who in 1807 had fallen out of favour with his patron, the
Prince of Wales.
Moore has already achieved acclaim for his drinking songs and
the opera "The Gipsy Prince" (music by Michael Kelly, 1801).
The products of this
encounter, "The Irish Melodies", were to prove a veritable corner-stone of
bourgeois popular song and provide Moore with a lucrative source of income,
since he negotiated terms which gave him one hundred guineas per song.
Between
1808 and 1834 they were issued serially in ten volumes, plus supplement.
As
happened with Burns, the cultural significance of Moore was later endorsed by
the adoption of one of his songs as a national anthem.
'Let Erin Remember'
remained Ireland's anthem until separation in 1921.
These anthems illustrate
classic hegemonic compromise.
Some acknowledgement of autonomy is demanded by
Scotland and Ireland, yet their independence is recognized only in the context
of a romantic and shadowy past.
--- WALES:
Of more recent date, the Welsh national anthem,
"Hen Wlad fy Nhadau" ('Land of My Fathers')
-- conforms to the same pattern, and
here the possession of an ancient independent language becomes a symbol of the
country's relative autonomy.
Back to Ireland.
One of Moore's main sources for Irish tunes was
Edward Bunting's "A General Collection of Ancient Irish Music", the first volume
of which had appeared in 1796.
Bunting, a prominent Belfast musician, is
inspired to begin his collection by the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792.
In spite
of considerable financial inducements, only eleven players arrived (one being
Welsh), a symptom of the decline of the bardic tradition which had followed the
rise of the Anglo-Irish gentry.
Bunting's collection contains distortions
dictated by contemporary taste.
There were new English words, piano
accompaniments, and, of course, the use of a classical musical notation which
corrected what in terms of its own grammatical system were regarded as
barbarisms, while being able only to approximate (when it was not simply
ignored) the richness of traditional melodic ornamentation.
Moore chose to
use no Irish dialect, but sometimes a novel English metre resulted from his
fitting words to a Gaelic melody.
at the mid-hour of night when stars are
weeping, I fly
to the lone vale we lov'd, when life shone warm in thine
eye.
In the example above, an old Irish metre is used, called ambrániocht.
Not all the melodies Moore chose, however, were Irish in the
first place.
"Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms" was written to a
tune already familiar to the words 'My Lodging Is on the Cold Ground', and 'As
Slow Our Ship' uses the tune 'Brighton Camp', already popular in the eighteenth
century as 'The Girl I Left Behind Me'.
The main sources for the words of
Moore's historical songs included established works such as Walker's Historical
Memoirs of Irish Bards and Warner's History of Ireland, as well as the
most recent transactions of the Gaelic Society of Dublin.
'Avenging and Bright',
the song written to the Gaelic air 'Cruchan na Feine', is drawn from a
translation of Deidre by O'Flanagan, a leading researcher in the Gaelic Society.
Some of Moore's metaphors are taken from ancient Irish poetry, for example, a
'chain of silence' or the 'sun-burst' of an unfurled banner.
The Irish Melodies
were in large part responsible for a new romantic view of Ireland and often
contained nothing more than melancholy nostalgia (like 'The Meeting of the
Waters'), occasionally not involving Ireland at all (like 'Love's Young Dream').
Nevertheless, nostalgia for the days of Ireland's liberty could leave a
subversive quality just beneath the surface of some songs.
Take the last lines
of 'The Valley Lay Smiling Before Me', set, tactfully, in the remote period of
Henry II:
but onward the green banner rearing
go flesh ev'ry sword to
the hilt
on our side is VIRTUE and ERIN
on theirs is the SAXON and
GUILT
The words could as easily apply to the raising of the green banner at
the battle of Vinegar Hill, 1798.
For similar reasons it is no surprise to find
'The Minstrel Boy' re-appropriated as an Irish song of resistance.
Moore leaves
Ireland to study law in London in 1799 but had been a friend of Robert Emmet,
who led the unsuccessful Dublin Rising of 1803.
Emmet was executed after being
captured on a visit to his girlfriend Sarah Curran, who reputedly died
thereafter of a broken heart.
Moore makes oblique reference to these events in
'She Is Far from the Land'.
Sir John Stevenson, the vicar-choral of Christ
Church Cathedral, Dublin, provided the accompaniments to Moore's Irish Melodies.
It was a shrewd decision to steer clear of the Viennese style which was so ill
suited to the collections of Scottish airs.
Stevenson's sympathies lay with the
ITALIAN style.
This was not entirely inappropriate since Celtic music had been
coming to terms with ITALIAN music for many years.
In Scotland, over three
hundred years before, James IV had emulated the life-style of an Italian
Renaissance prince.
In Ireland the 'last of the bards', Turlough Carolan
(1670-1738), shows the unmistakable influence of those Italian contemporaries
whose music was heard in Dublin:
Corelli
Vivaldi
Germiniani
-- in his own harp
music.
Stevenson is familiar with at least some of Carolan's music.
Stevenson adapts
Carolan's wide-ranging air 'The Fairy Queen' for four voices in order that Moore
could set words to it.
The task of fitting words to this melody is considerable
and shows the extent of Moore's skill.
Stevenson's accompaniments rarely favour
strong rhythmic patterns.
'The Minstrel Boy' is an exception.
He prefers to
write rippling harp-like figuration.
The simple, unfussy quality, in which,
perhaps, rhythmic languor plays a necessary role, earns the arrangements the
epithet 'chaste' from a mid-Victorian editor, who goes on to say in respect of
the words.
Little need be said of the merits of the work, the sentiments and
narrative of the songs being such as will ever recommend them to the universal
praise and sympathies of mankind.
In further support of Moore's healthy
universality of appeal, Holman Hunt depicts in "The Awakening Conscience" (1854) a
fallen woman beginning to realize the error of her ways after hearing her lover
play a few bars of 'Oft in the Stilly Night' (one of Moore's National
Melodies).
The most well-known of
the Irish Melodies was 'The Last Rose of Summer'.
The tune was taken from
Alfred Milliken's The Groves of Blarney of the eighteenth century, in turn
thought to be based on a seventeenth-century Irish harp tune.
The Irish harp
certainly could not have played 'The Last Rose of Summer' in its present melodic
shape, since once tuned it was fixed in pitch and therefore unable to cope with
the sharpened note in the phrase 'no rosebud is nigh'.
The accompaniment
throughout is harp-like, although the chords are spread from low note to high in
classical manner rather than high to low in the old Irish manner.
Stevenson
writes an accompaniment in triplets (three notes performed in the time of two)
even though there is nothing particular in the tune to justify this approach.
The rhythmic effect of triplets was soon to become a common device employed to
generate gentle musical tension, evoking a mood of sweet melancholy.
The melody
itself is decorated with notes which momentarily clash, then resolve on to the
accompanying harmonies, as occurs at the word 'of' in
'Tis the last rose OF summer'.
These dissonances also create the tension necessary for
evocation of the desired mood.
Sometimes the dissonance is crude and
unconsidered, as on the final syllable of 'rosebud'.
Three of the
four musical phrases reach their highest point in their respective first bars
and are then dominated by a falling motion.
It is easy to hear them as emotional
musical parallels to the drooping of the dead 'lovely companions' and the
heaving of 'sigh for sigh'.
'tis the last rose of summer
left blooming
alone
all her lovely companions
are faded and gone
no flow'r other
kindred
no rosebud is nigh
to reflect back her blushes
or give sigh
for sigh.
I'll not leave thee thou lone one
to pine on the
stem
since the lovely are sleeping
go sleep thou with them
thus
kindly I scatter
thy leaves on the bed
where thy mates of the
garden
lie scentless and dead
so soon may I follow
when friendships
decay
& from love's shining circle
the gems drop away
when true
hearts lie withered
& fond ones are flown
o who would
inhabit
this bleak world alone.
Moore's verses are typical of his output
in seeking to conjure up a sense of loss.
There is usually no remedy offered
beyond the melancholy pleasure of indulging the feeling for its own sake, but in
the circumstances described above he advocates floral euthanasia.
The imagined
loss of love and friendship was a cosy emotion to wallow in while encircled by
family intimacy in the drawing room.
In fact, it can only reinforce the
pleasure of family ties in the comfortable knowledge that one did not inhabit
this bleak world alone.
It thus promoted the important Victorian, values of
friendship and family.
While Moore was producing his "Irish Melodies", George
Thomson had managed to interest Beethoven in arranging airs.
At first Beethoven
arranges Irish songs because Thomson is temporarily out of stock of Scottish
songs (even so, Beethoven's 25 Irish Songs of 1814 include such unlikely
examples of Hibernian minstrelsy as 'The Massacre of Glencoe').
Thomson had also
taken an interest in Welsh airs, publishing three volumes of A Select Collection
of Original Welsh Airs between 1809 and 1817.
Beethoven furnished twenty-six
arrangements for the last volume.
Moore's success soon found an echo in
Thomson's publications.
Five tunes arranged by Beethoven in 1816 had already
been used by Moore.
Thomson has the poet William Smyth provide words of no
possible ambiguity for 'The Soldier' (his version of 'The Minstrel Boy').
It is
full of a military bravado befitting the calls of 'honour', 'country', and
'duty' during the close of the Napoleonic war.
'tis you, 'tis I, that may
meet the ball
& me it better pleases
in battle, brave, with the brave
to fall
than to die of dull diseases.
Thomson had several other poets
working for him, including Sir Walter Scott, and also relied upon verses written
by Burns.
Beethoven, to his frustration, was often denied the text.
Thomson
feared that he would have the songs published on the continent and that they
would then work their way from there into Britain.
To Thomson's surprise,
however, Beethoven's arrangements lacked the commercial success of Stevenson's.
Thomson thought, in view of Beethoven's greater stature as a composer, that it
was the comparative difficulty of his arrangements which was to blame.
Beethoven
responded tetchily to a reprimand on these lines, saying Thomson should have
given him a better understanding of 'le goût de votre pays et le peu de facilité
de vos executeurs' -- your country's taste and your players' lack of expertise.
A comparison between a Stevenson and a Beethoven arrangement of
the same tune would indicate that the problem was not merely ease of execution.
The song
"By the Side of the Shannon" (no. 8 of Beethoven's 12 Songs of Various
Nationality) employs the same melody, 'Paddy's Resource', as that used for the
alternative version of Moore's 'When Daylight Was Yet Sleeping'.
Comparing
nothing more than the melody's accompaniment, it is indeed evident that
Beethoven demands more playing skill, but he also does two things which
Stevenson does not.
Beethoven duplicates the melody on the piano, and he provides
musical punctuations within the phrase structure of the song rather than
confining the accompaniment's independence to before and after the verses.
Doubling a melody in the accompaniment is a common practice of Beethoven's,
featuring in his songs of all kinds.
But this sort of support for the singer was
beginning to seem UNNECESSARY AND OLD-FASHIONED (HOW I AGREE!). .
Beethoven's
Viennese style and his own strong musical character are more jarring than the
anonymously Italianate Stevenson.
Neither of them sees much attraction in the
modal nature of some of the airs they handle.
Beethoven's second version of
'Highland Harry' (No. 6 of 12 Scottish Songs) shows him modernizing the tune by
making continual use of the sophisticated chord of the dominant ninth rather
than treating it as the antiquated dorian mode.
The modes were the old system
of scales ousted by the invention of keys in the seventeenth century.
Beethoven must have made a conscious decision to bring the modal airs up to date
by supplying contemporary harmony.
His familiarity with modal practice is
demonstrated by the slow movement of his String Quartet Op. 132.
When Stevenson
is confronted with modes (as in 'Avenging and Bright' and 'Lesbia Hath a
Beaming Eye'), he reacted as Beethoven did and squeezed them into the nearest
equivalent modern key.
No doubt he regarded this as a form of musical
refinement.
Like Stevenson, Beethoven arranges some of the airs for more than
one voice but preferred a high voice to carry the melody even in a solo setting,
whereas Stevenson favoured the middle-voice range which made his arrangements
more accommodating to the untrained voices of amateurs.
Stevenson's
accompaniments were for piano only.
Beethoven added parts for violin and cello.
The added string parts were not popular, so Thomson urges a reluctant Beethoven
to connsider the fashionable flute instead of the violin.
The request helps to
locate the position of Thomson's project in Scottish cultural life.
It
illustrates the distance between the musical interests pursued by Thomson's
middle-class patrons and the indigenous style of Scottish fiddling, promoted by
the landed ARISTOCRACY, which was in its heyday.
Beethoven only succumbed to the
pressure to write for flute in his purely instrumental op. 105 and op. 107.
In
some ways these piano and flute variations represent Beethoven's most successful
treatment of the airs he received: op. 107, no. 8, for example, shows an
imaginative working in his distinctive late style.
Thomson engages other
composers, such as Hummel, Weber, and even Bishop (who had been the arranger for
the three volumes of Moore's National Airs).
Yet in the end his publications met
with limited success.
In 1855 he sold off his entire stock cheaply to a music
dealer.
He must have noted with bitter irony how Tom Moore's 'Those Evening
Bells', set to a melody attributed to Beethoven, had become a drawing-room
favourite.
Burns and Moore point the way ahead to the Scottish and
Irish ballads of the Victorian period and to a refined pseudo-folksong.
In the
years immediately after Burns' death, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was
collecting for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802),
assisted by Joseph Ritson (1752-1803) and James Hogg (1770-1835).
Hogg, the son of an Ettrick farmer and often styled 'the Ettrick shepherd', makes a
determined effort to assume the mantle of Burns in his "Jacobite Relics of
Scotland" (1819).
The true successor to Burns, who produced a
wealth of enduring Scottish songs, is Lady Carolina Nairne (1766-1845).
She was
named Carolina after Prince Charles Stuart, and became 'Lady' Nairne only after
the revival of the Jacobite peerage in 1824 (one of the relaxing easures which
followed Scott's invitation to George IV to visit Scotland two years earlier).
Many other songs appeared anonymously in The Scottish Minstrel (1821-24).
A
collected edition, acknowledging her authorship, is published posthumously in
1846 as Lays/rom Stratheam (musical arrangements by Finlay Dun).
Carolina Nairne's songs are
an innocuous blend of romantic and sentimental Jacobitism (as seen in 'The
Hundred Pipers' and 'Will Ye No Come Back Again?').
As was the case with
ITALIAN OPERATIC AIRS, nostalgia was the favourite mood of the 'national airs'.
The
urban bourgeoisie feels no interest in the contemporary reels and jigs of figures
of such central importance to Scottish fiddling as Niel Gow (1727-1807) at Blair
Castle or William Marshall (1748-1833) at Gordon Castle.
Rev.J. Riddle of
Oxford, for one, was far more interested in further dignifying Lady Nairne's
verse by translating it into ancient Greek.
The second volume of Hogg's Jacobite
Relics does contain verses written to 'Flora MacDonald's Lament', a violin tune
by Niel Gow Jun. (1795-1825).
And Lady Nairne supplied words to a tune by
Nathaniel Gow (1763-1831), one of a series in which the fiddler intended to
illustrate the street-cries of Edinburgh.
In 'Caller Herrin' he attempted to
portray the cry of the Newhaven fishwives set against the pealing of the bells
of St Andrews, George Street.
From the desire to dignify a Celtic air to the
wish to imitate one, or decorate a song with Celtic features, was a small move.
Imitation Scottish song was not a new thing.
James Hook's "Twas Within a Mile o'
Edinburgh Town' is a well-known eighteenth-century example of pseudo-Scottish
song.
Products like Mrs Gibson's setting of Byron's 'Lochnagar' and Rev. William
Leeves' setting of Lady Lindsay's 'Auld Robin Gray', however, signal a new
departure.
----
REFERENCES:
J. W. Glover's Preface in 1859 Dublin edition of the Irish
Melodies. The song may be found in Turner and Miall
Kalischer, A. C. Beethoven's Letters. Trans. J. S.
Shedlock. New York: Dover, 1972.
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